FEBRUARY I, 1917.
will have to be done a vast amount of the same sort
of work. After all, it does require more effort of
the imagination to believe that travel by aeroplane
is really as safe as by car, besides having the added
merit of far greater speed and freedom. It is not
enough to merely assert that this is the case in order to
carry conviction. But the war has helped to advance
the cause in a manner and to an extent which we shall
only begin to realise when peace comes again. It has
brought into the movement many thousands who would
never have been identified with it otherwise. Every
one of those recruits will be a missionary for the great
cause of aviation after the war, and thus the conversion
of the layman will be far and away easier and more
rapid than otherwise it would have been.
We do not want to indulge in far-fetched dreams
of the future, but we can visualise within the next
decade a movement that will have outgrown the most
sanguine expectations of the present. There is no
reason why Lord Montagu's ideal of regular aeroplane
services between India and England should not have
materialised into commonplace fact by then. We
shall have regular Transatlantic aerial services.
Internally, we shall have vast numbers of aircraft
employed on all sorts of public services—passenger,
postal, and commercial. The number of private
machines in use will have become legion—it will
be no more extraordinary to own an aeroplane than
to possess a car. We doubt not that some of our
readers will smile at these prophecies. The answer
to that is : regard what has happened in the last
decade. With that as a text, is it extravagant to
expect anything less than we have outlined ?
After a careful examination of the
Propose of the Director of National
Service, we cannot say that we are
extremely enamoured of them. We are told that it
is necessary to get men away from the non-essential
trades and into those that are essential. By essential
we understand trades that are directly or at least
indirectly related to the production of munitions or
other material of war. If people are not willing to
volunteer from those non-essential trades, then we
are point-blank informed that industrial conscription
is to be the resort. To begin with, we do not believe
that there are large numbers of men employed in
the " non-essential " trades who would be of very
much use in the " essential " ones without a longer or
shorter period of training to fit them for their new
spheres of work. Another point is that no two people
are likely to agree upon a definition of what really
constitutes a " non-essential " trade. As a matter
of fact, we should hesitate to pronounce any trade
non-essential, inasmuch—and the present record
loam is an object-lesson in this connection—as we
require money and yet more money to carry the war
to a victorious end, and if we are going to cripple some
and close down others of the trades that are providing
a very large proportion of the sinews of war, then,
without the very greatest judgment and discretion
is used, we are simply killing the goose that lays the
golden eggs.
Before we proceed to the extremity of the kind of
industrial conscription that is connoted by the threat
to "comb out " the non-essential trades, we cannot
avoid thinking that the Government would do well
to think over a thorough sift of the Army itself.
In the days when voluntary recruiting was the vogue,
in addition to hordes of hopelessly useless men as
soldiers, many many thousands of skilled woikers
found their way into the ranks. Some proportion
of the latter have been released for work in the
munition factories, but there still remain large numbers
of these men who would be worth much more to the
State in the factories at home than they are behind
the lines in France. Under the compulsory system
of military service the waste of man-power has been
appalling. Every day cases come to light in which
men who are useful civilians are drafted into the rank>
to make bad soldiers. This is the worst kind of
economy for the State, inasmuch as it transforms the
man who is of use to the community either as a workei
or as a tax-payer into one who is a sheer and utterh
useless burden. For this the tribunals are very
largely to blame, though the central authorities cannot
altogether be absolved. On the part of the lattei
there seems to be too much of a prevailing idea that
the nation's resources are in the nature of a bottom-
less reservoir which is akin to the widow's cruse of
oil. On the contrary, there is a distinct limit to our
resources, and there is no apparent indication that
this is recognised by the Government. The fact of
the matter is that we are running decentralisation
to death. We have created almost numberless
departments, each with a Controller of Something or
Other at its head. Quite naturally, each controllei
is out to get the best results for his department, and <
it is equally natural that, with the best intentions in
the world, he tries for those results without too much
thought for the effects produced thereby on other ~
departments. We have the Army, the Navy, the
Ministry of Munitions, the Food Controller, the
Controller of National Service, all competing against ^
each other in the labour market, with the consequence
that the competition between the Army and the Navy
for aeroplanes, which we have so often deplored,
becomes a thing of little consequence in comparison.
We have never liked the extension of the "Control" ~
system, and the more we see of it the less we are
inclined to modify our dislike. It is not that we object
to being controlled, but we do object to the appalling
waste of resources the system has produced. We are ..
supposed to have a " Business Government " now, V
and we do submit to that Government that the present
wastefulness of the whole system is not " business." -,
•2^ »> •*• ''S'-'
At the end of November last the com-
Ftae rnittee of the Society of British Aircraft
Response. Constructors appealed to the aircraft
industry for support for the Air Services
Winter Comforts Fund. In response to this appeal
no less a sum than £6,785, of which details appear
elsewhere in this issue of " FLIGHT," has been received,
and has been divided in the rough proportions of
two-thirds to the R.F.C. and one-third to the R.N.A.S.
We congratulate Lady Henderson and Mrs. Murray
Sueter on the splendid accession to the funds of the
organisation in which they have so ably interested
themselves since the first winter of the war. We
doubt not that they will be able to make the best
possible use of the money, and of more when it is
forthcoming. So far as concerns this last, we under-
stand that although this money has been handed over
to the fund, the latter is by no means closed, so that
if any of those who may not have had their attention
called to the list feel inclined to contribute to so
deserving a cause, there is no reason in the world why
they should not do so.
102